


This Time

by battle_cat



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Action, Canon-Typical Violence, Combat, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Sexual Content, injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-16 18:57:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11834964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: A scavenging run goes awry and Max and Furiosa must fight their way back to the Citadel, together.A remix of"Next time"by Splinter.





	This Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Splinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splinter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Next time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8164768) by [Splinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splinter/pseuds/Splinter). 



The settlement is one of those places that was once _something_ before, even if no one remembers what: a handful of low buildings around a single dirt road, long since rotted out and crumbled by the desert sun and wind, roofs fallen in and windows empty. 

It’s dead still, and silent, and it makes Max’s skin crawl.

There’s no good spot to hide the car, so he settles for parking it equidistant from the buildings that seem most promising for scavenging. The road is wide enough for a quick fishtailing U-turn if they need it.

This husk of a place seems hardly worth any salvage they might find. There are far too many windows and corners to watch for the glint of a rifle scope, and his instincts are screaming _GO_ in that way he shouldn’t ignore. But they had agreed to check it out on behalf of the Citadel, and Furiosa isn’t about to back down from a mission. She takes both her pistol and rifle when they get out of the car, though.

There are makeshift shacks tucked between the buildings here and there, assembled from odd salvage, an occasional scrap of sun-bleached cloth fluttering in the breeze. A hand-dug well between the two largest buildings looks like it hasn’t seen water in a thousand days.

Furiosa keeps her finger on the trigger guard of her rifle as they poke through the larger buildings. The one that seems to have once been a garage yields a few useful parts and tools, which Max tucks into the bag over his shoulder. One of the huts contains a crumbling cardboard box full of canned…something. Even if the food inside is no good, the cans themselves are valuable for making thundersticks. 

He’s loading the box into the back of the car when something rattles in the alleyway.

Furiosa whips her rifle up before he can even turn. After a couple pounding heartbeats a crow flutters out of the alley.

She exhales an audible breath. Her gaze flicks over to meet his. She’s as tense as he is.

“Each take a side?” she suggests. “Get it done faster?”

He doesn’t like the idea of splitting up, but he doesn’t want to hang around longer than necessary either. And the place is small enough that they’ll be in earshot—and rifle shot—of each other as long as they stick to the main street. He nods. Furiosa heads left and he goes right.

He’s inside one of the old buildings, poking around through a pile of desiccated plastic bottles for anything sturdy enough to be worth taking when he hears the shots.

He’s at the doorway in time to see Furiosa crash through the sun-rotted door of a building across the street and tumble to the ground, grappling with a masked attacker.

He runs for her and gets body-slammed by an assailant he doesn’t even see coming. He does see the spiked club in the person’s hand and rolls out of the way of its swing, rolls back and kicks out hard at a knee and sends the person to the ground. Before he can get to his feet someone else—someone _heavy_ —lands on his back slamming him face-first into the dirt.

The person’s trying to get an arm around his throat and he’s clawing at their hand, trying to latch on to a finger to break. Their hot breath is in his ear and he slams an elbow back, connects with something hard on pure luck, unbalances them enough to shove them off—

Furiosa is on the ground; the crack of her rifle fells one, two attackers coming out of a building _he knows was empty when they looked_ —

He’s on his feet—putting a bullet in the face of the club-wielder as he’s trying to get up—and then a hand grabs the back of his jacket and slams him into the wall of the building hard enough to crack his head against the concrete and see a flash of stars—he manages to hang on to the gun and fire at a booted foot, the only thing he can see—a howl of pain from his attacker but it only makes them slam him against the wall again—

There’s a crack and a splatter of blood against the back of his neck and the person behind him collapses. He’s reeling, vision doubled, and as he turns he can see Furiosa taking cover behind the car, landing killshots on his opponents that are _still coming from somewhere_ —

She suddenly disappears behind the car, and he hears her feral growl of rage—a bang of something hard against the body of the car—and then her scream of pain—

Terror pours like ice into his veins, and he’s running toward the car even though his knee feels full of white-hot shrapnel, skidding around the front bumper to see Furiosa slumped face-down on the sand, an attacker kneeling over her with a blunt metal club raised—

He empties half the clip into the guy without thinking, watches him fall heavily and doesn’t see the person lurking in the alley until the crowbar they’re swinging is an inch from his face.

He blocks on instinct, the metal meeting his left arm and sending pain radiating through his left side. He ducks the next blow, points the gun but it’s empty— _fuck_ —and the backswing of the crowbar connects with his raised left fist and it’s like hot metal shattering in his hand, the pain makes him stagger and suddenly he’s on his knees as his attacker goes for another blow—

There’s a shot and the crowbar-wielder jerks and when Max squints into the sun he can see most of the man’s jaw is now an exit wound. He collapses on the sand.

Max’s left arm is radiating pain. He flexes it a little and the pain spikes enough to make him retch. He stumbles to his feet with gritted teeth.

Furiosa is sitting against the car surrounded by five dead bodies, the Glock from the passenger-side door holster still clutched in her flesh hand. A knot is already growing above her left eyebrow. Her face and chest are crusted with blood and sand. Her metal hand is clamped ineffectually over a gash in her right thigh, blood spreading onto the sand even as he watches.

She looks down at the wound as he stumbles over to her, as if just remembering that she has it. “Fuck…” she breathes, and there’s a flicker of real fear in her eyes.

“Hey, no, it’s okay, you’re okay.” He’s muttering nonsense, shoving a body out of the way to get down on the sand next to her. When she moves her hand he can see how deep the wound is, a vicious knife slash down through fat and muscle. It hasn’t hit the artery; even his panic-scrambled brain knows it’s on the wrong side for that. But there is a lot of blood.

She’s not wearing her black scarf but he is, and he tugs it off and with three working hands between them they wind it as tightly around her thigh as they can. He’s trying not to think about how he can barely move his left arm and hand, how the fuck he’s going to drive like that, if there are more attackers—

“Fuck did they even come from?” he says, to have something to say while he’s tugging the bandage a little tighter and trying not to hear her hiss of pain.

“Tunnels,” she rasps. “In the buildings. Saw ‘em come out.”

He wants to go drop a grenade down each one right now. But Furiosa is pale and shaking beside him and they need to get the fuck out of here.

Between leaning on the car and his right hand he manages to get her up and into the passenger seat, both of them panting and grunting with pain. She’s slow and slurry, from concussion or blood loss or both. “Gehmy guns,” she mumbles as he gingerly tucks her injured leg inside the car. He props the rifle between her legs and slides the Glock into the holster between the passenger seat and gearbox, where she can reach it with her right hand. He doesn’t know where his salvage bag ended up in the chaos of the fight and he doesn’t care.

The engine roars to life. Straightening his arm enough to reach the gearstick sends a hot flare of pain from shoulder to fingertips, but he doesn’t feel like he’s about to pass out. He bites his lip and finds that that hurts too. Fine, it’ll keep him awake and focused at least.

But his left hand…fuck, he’d swear it’s only the ring and pinky fingers that are broken but the whole thing is rapidly swelling up. Gripping the gearstick is hard enough; gripping the wheel is impossible. He palms his way through a messy U-turn, manages to get the car into fifth and floors it out of the town.

He’s driven through worse pain, he tells himself as every rattle of the undercarriage sends a sharp, wrong jolt through his elbow and forearm. He sneaks a glance at Furiosa. She’s far too pale, her metal hand still holding the wadded-up ends of his scarf pressed hard over her thigh. He can already see blood soaking through the dark fabric.

He pushes the engine a little bit faster. They’re not far from the Citadel if they drive fast and meet no trouble.

Over the edge of a shallow ridge there’s a pocket of loose sand and gravel and he has to downshift. The spike of pain when he tries to close his hand around the gearshift knob is sharp enough to make his eyes water.

Just as panic rises to a paralyzing whine, her hand is there, sliding under his to grip the gearstick. Her fingers are sticky with blood but her grip is firm. He sneaks a glance at her—she’s pallid and sweaty but her gaze is clear. “I’ll do it,” she says. “Just…keep your hand there and I’ll move it.”

He’s not sure how this could possibly work—the way he drives is instinctual, a reflex far beyond explaining at this point; he might as well ask someone else to breathe for him. But if there’s anyone who could…

“Not dead yet,” she says, and even though her lip is split and her left eye is swelling shut from the blow, there’s just a tiny, tiny hint of challenge in her voice. “We can do it.”

They’re on hard-packed sand now. “Fifth,” he says, and as his hand twitches, ready to move, she’s already doing it.

It shouldn’t work, but it somehow does. She hasn’t driven the Interceptor like he has, enough for it to feel like an extension of his body, but she’s driven it enough, and she’s _driven_ plenty. If he keeps his hand on top of hers the unconscious patterns of his brain work almost the same way. They have the same instincts, the same reflexes; half the time he doesn’t even have to say what gear he’s going for. Sometimes he sees her left foot twitch, pressing a clutch that isn’t there.

On a long, flat plain he risks taking his eye off the horizon to look at her. She’s still pale and beat to shit, her jaw tight with pain, but she catches his gaze and the corner of her mouth twitches up.

Her gaze slides past his face to something in his jerry-rigged side mirror and the smile disappears.

“Behind us.”

There’s a cloud of dust behind them, rapidly approaching.

He leans a little harder on the accelerator.

They’re close to Citadel territory, which means maybe they can get within range of a patrol before the car gets too close. But it also means that the pursuers are likely to be—

“Buzzards.” She’s looking in her mirror at the cloud of dust and spikes barreling over the low hills to their left. “At least two.”

She slides her hand out from under his on the gearstick and starts loading weapons.

“Distress flare?” he asks as she presses a stripper clip into her rifle.

“Too far out. Only give away our position if there’s more of ‘em.”

He nudges the engine a little faster, skating along the redline. “Outrun ‘em maybe.”

“Maybe.”

She is still loading weapons.

In the end, it’s the one they don’t see. The spiky car bursts out from behind the hills practically on top of them, far ahead of the one Furiosa had spotted in the mirror. She gets one shot off and takes out the Buzzard gunner in the passenger seat before she ducks into the footwell with a yelp as the car slams into them, rusty spikes lancing in through the window frame where she’d been aiming her rifle a second before.

“Stay down!” He has the shotgun ready, the wheel held steady with his injured forearm even though it fucking _hurts,_ and he fires a blast at the driver that’s enough to send him skidding away from them at least for now.

The two other cars are closing in on them, and suddenly there’s a third from somewhere else, then a fourth. Furiosa kneels in the footwell and takes shot after shot at the cars behind them. They crest a shallow rise and he can _see_ the Citadel, blunt towers ruddy in the afternoon sun.

Two small, fast buggies, the spiny pups of some demented species, suddenly shoot ahead of them. In a split second he sees the spiked chain strung between them, ready to be dropped to shred his tires.

“Hang on!” He brakes hard, skidding and throwing up a plume of sand. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Furiosa slam against the dash hard, and then everything is lost in a plume of sand and steam and spinning as the engine sputters and stalls out.

Was there one more Buzzard car behind them? Had Furiosa taken them all out? He seems to have a lot of time to think as they spin.

They’ve come to rest, facing which direction, he has no idea. He coughs and waves at dust as he tries to get the engine to turn over.

He can hear explosions somewhere close, and whooping yells.

War Boy yells.

The next second two Citadel pursuit vehicles—he can’t make out who’s driving, but the war cries are unmistakable—roar past them, chasing whatever is left of the Buzzard attack.

“Furi?” She is slumped over against the passenger seat, and there’s one moment of pure crystalline terror.

Then she coughs and mutters, “Schlangers.”

She eases herself into the seat with a groan, and then she abruptly leans over and pukes out the window.

He can’t do anything with his left arm except clutch it against his body, so he reaches over and puts an awkward right hand on her shoulder. “Fuck,” she mumbles, and then heaves again.

There’s a double blast of a horn he recognizes, and then Toast’s patrol hot rod pulls up next to him, her unofficial ace, a War Boy named Lug, riding shotgun.

“You both look like shit,” she says, her gaze scanning through a quick inventory of injuries. “You gonna let me drive?”

And somehow, he does, crouched in the back behind the passenger seat, trying to hold Furiosa steady with his right arm while his left one radiates a deep, sick ache with every heartbeat. The Buzzard fight hadn’t done any favors for her head trauma, and now that the adrenaline is wearing off she is suddenly, alarming out of it. Her thigh wound, which might have clotted by now if not for all the kneeling in the footwell, has long since bled through the bandage, a hand’s width of her leathers soaked dark below it.

Toast had barely smothered a look of glee when he let her behind the wheel, but now that she’s gotten a better look at both of them her voice is tight and scared. “Nearly there,” she says, diligently focusing on the road.

“Where we…goin?” mutters Furiosa. Her left eye is swollen shut under a spreading bruise now, her right eye unfocused.

“Home.” He’s still not sure he considers it _his_ home, not really, but sleeping next to her is the closest he’s felt to anything like that in longer than he can remember.

“‘S…not there anymore. ‘S all dried up,” she slurs.

“Not there. Citadel,” he corrects as gently as he can.

“Oh.” She sounds disappointed.

He wishes he could tuck her into his arms, let her fall asleep against his chest like that other long day in a car driving back to the Citadel. But he’s stuck sitting awkwardly behind her on a box of supplies, so he settles for resting his temple against the unbruised side of her face.

 

Mel, the Vuvalini woman who runs the infirmary now, gives a resigned sigh when they show up. “On the table,” she says to the War Boys who are carrying Furiosa on a stretcher.

Furiosa is still groggy, swinging between her normal convalescent grumpiness and flashes of something else. She resists even Mel’s gentle hands taking her clothes off, suddenly curling up like a hurt animal hiding her wounds, vulnerable and frightened.

There’s not much he can do when any movement above the waist risks jarring his arm, so he just keeps his face close to hers and mumbles nonsense reassurances, about how she’s okay and she’s safe, and it seems to help a little, and it doesn’t hurt in holding his own suffocating wave of panic at bay. The infirmary is almost unrecognizable from what it was like during the Organic Mechanic’s time, but neither of them have good memories of it. At some point her hand finds his uninjured one and squeezes, gently at first, then tight enough it feels like she intends to break a few more fingers while Mel is stitching up her leg wound.

Furiosa has a livid bruise on her ribs (he’s sure it’s from her slamming into the dash of the Interceptor when he braked, and it makes him cringe with guilt), the lump on her forehead and a dozen smaller scrapes and bruises. Max’s arm and two of his fingers need to be set; he twitches at how much the cast is going to restrict his movement but Mel does not look open to negotiation. The scrape at his hairline had bled dramatically down his face but turns out to be shallow enough he doesn’t even need stitches.

“I suppose it could be worse,” she grumbles, and he’s been patched up by her enough times to know that this is her way of expressing relief.

Eventually they’re both bandaged and propped up in cots within arm’s reach. (By now every medical worker has conceded that one of them will end up crawling into bed with the other if they’re placed further apart than that, and the infirmary cots have their structural limitations.) Mel brings them both the tea that will slide them into sleep and ease pain. Furiosa doesn’t even argue over drinking hers, which means she must be seriously hurting. Max swigs his eagerly, grateful for anything that will make sleeping in the infirmary easier.

Next to him, Furiosa is drifting somewhere between sleep and waking. He wants to touch her, but he doesn’t, because he also wants to watch her drift off into soft unguarded sleep.

Her thigh is neatly bandaged, her other cuts and scrapes clotted and wiped clean. She’s been re-dressed in the clean, faded t-shirt and soft shorts that pass for hospital gowns in the infirmary. They are safe. She is going to be all right. This time. Next time… He can’t think about next time.

Now that the adrenaline of battle has faded the exhaustion is crushing. He wriggles into the least uncomfortable position he can find and lets the tea drag him under.

 

He wakes up to Furiosa’s screams and a bruising elbow in the ribs. She’s thrashing, in the grips of a nightmare, and trying to touch her is usually asking to get punched, but she’s going to rip her stitches out at this rate—

“Furiosa. Wake up.” He gives her shoulder a hard shake with his good hand, and gets a volley of eye-watering kicks to his shins before she jolts awake, breathing like a drowning person pulled out of the water.

“Hey. You’re okay.” Her eyes flick around the moonlit room and finally latch onto his face. She’s covered with sweat, and where the tangled infirmary blanket has been pushed aside he can see red spotting through the bandage on her thigh.

Quick footsteps approach and the night attendant, a trainee healer barely older than a pup, pulls back the curtain with a lantern in their hand.

Furiosa turns her face away from the light, and even though nightmares are a novelty to no one at the Citadel, Max thinks she’s ashamed. She usually has them in private, waking up with a held-in gasp she tries to hide even from him. The screaming ones are rare, but they’re the worst kind.

“We’re fine,” he tells the attendant, and after a minute they believe it and withdraw, taking the circle of golden light with them.

He lets his eyes adjust to the dark again. Furiosa is still breathing hard beside him. After a moment she mutters a quiet, “Thank you.”

It makes his arm twinge, but he slides down to lie flat on the bed so his face is next to hers. The eye that isn’t swollen shut glitters in the faint beam of moonlight.

He strokes carefully down the uninjured side of her face. She lets out a shuddery exhale.

“Think you ripped your stitches,” he says. “Mel’s gonna be pissed.” That gets a tiny, breathy laugh.

She’s still shaking from the nightmare. Between her various bruises and his restricted arm movement there is really no curling up together, and he suddenly misses her skin against his with an intensity that feels like a physical ache. All he can do is tuck their faces close together, his fingers rubbing little circles in her short hair. It seems to be enough for her, because gradually he hears her breathing even out.

“You got me back,” she whispers after a time.

He hums. As if anything else were an option.

 

She wakes up in her room, in the grey light of early morning. It’s been two (three?) days of pain and confusion, drifting between present and nightmare and memory. She hasn’t spent more than a few hours in the infirmary since she lost her arm, preferring to nurse her wounds in her room unless physically incapable of getting there.

She’s in the bed alone. Max is sleeping next to her in some sort of strange lumpy chair she vaguely remembers being in the Milk Mothers’ quarters. His face is turned toward her, a few days’ stubble around a healing split in his lip, hair a spiky mess. His bare torso is a colorful canvas of bruises, and she’s sure she looks the same.

She has a vague recollection, of being disoriented and scared, not being sure which Citadel this was, the old one or the new, and fighting whoever was trying to treat her wounds. But then Max had been there, and he’d been telling her it was safe and she’d latched onto it like a handhold on a speeding rig, because if he said it then it must be true. He wouldn’t lie to her.

She lies there watching him until he wakes up. She smiles when his gaze meets hers, and he smiles back as much as his split lip will allow.

For three days (or two?) they haven’t had the privacy, or the physical strength, to touch each other, and she is suddenly starving for his skin. If she scoots to the edge of the bed she can reach out just far enough to run a gentle hand down his side. His body is warm, well-fed enough to have just the tiniest bit of softness, but with a solid core of muscle underneath.

She’s barely even touched him and she can feel herself revving up. _Fuck it,_ she thinks, and slides her legs gingerly over the edge of the bed.

“I’ve got bruised ribs,” she says in response to his raised eyebrows. “I’m supposed to keep moving.”

He huffs out a laugh, and then winces as it jolts his arm. “You also have a thigh wound.”

That might as well be a dare. She leans heavily on the wall and eases herself up. Her leg hurts, but it’ll take weight, and if she’s careful she can get what she wants without damaging the stitches.

He’s got his feet propped up on a little stool with faded upholstery that looks like it once matched the chair. With his good hand to steady her and her good leg to take most of the weight she manages to ease a leg over to straddle him, shuffles closer until she’s standing over his thighs. Then she takes his hand and slides it into her shorts.

He gives a soft groan at the wetness he finds there. His fingers explore, stroking just enough to make her breath catch.

“Y’know,” he murmurs. “Broken fingers aside…when we were driving together…‘s kinda sexy.”

She smiles, then gasps a little as he slips a finger shallowly inside her. “Did you like how I, ahh, handled your gearstick?”

He hums, sliding his finger out of her to trace a delicate circle around her clit. She sways, suddenly has to brace herself on the shoulder of his uninjured arm. She tugs off her shorts, suddenly out of patience, and then she tugs at the blanket over his lap, pulling it down to find his cock hard in the loose pants he’s wearing.

“‘S okay?” she checks, her fingers at the waistband of his pants. He nods. He’s as bashed up as her, and as desperate to be close.

They work his pants down with one hand each. Straddling him is a precarious affair; neither of them can move their upper bodies much and every flex of her thigh muscle sends a deep throb of pain from hip to toes. She works his cock into her slowly, and by the time she’s sitting in his lap they’re both sweating. But she doesn’t want to stop, and he doesn’t suggest it either.

She can’t move much, but she rocks and squeezes him with the muscles inside her, and the tips of his fingers stroke slowly over her clit, and it’s enough, more than enough for both of them. Her leg hurts, an aching counterpoint to the pleasure, but for now she doesn’t mind the pain. Pain means you’re alive.

She wants to tell him all the things she wants to do to him when their bodies are back to firing on all cylinders, all the many ways she wants him inside her—but just the gentle rhythm they have going has her out of breath.

She wants to tell him what it means to her, that he made sure she got back, that she knows with iron certainty she would do the same for him—but she can’t say that without crying, and then she’s crying anyway, quiet tears that sting her blacked eye. She thinks he’s crying too; when he nuzzles against her, his cheek is hot and damp.

“‘S okay,” he’s murmuring. “‘S good…it’s so good…” The sound she makes when she comes is more a sob than anything else, and when she feels his hips twitch up sharply against her a second later she grinds down, rocks and squeezes hard even though it makes her leg burn, presses her face against the least bruised part of him she can reach while he shudders and comes.

They don’t move for a long moment, catching their breath. At some point she realizes her legs are shaking.

She eases off him, helps him slide his pants back up. He adjusts his arm with a grimace. “Maybe…shouldn’t have done that,” he grits out.

“Not sorry.” Her right leg feels like overstressed rubber that’s been set on fire, but it was worth it. “Not ever sorry.”

Her shorts are on the floor and bending down to pick them up seems like an impossible project, and she’s honestly inclined to say fuck it and get back into bed half-naked. But Max manages to hook them with his foot and toss them up to her, and that small way of taking care of her almost has her crying again. She bites down on her lip and manages to slide them on and ease back into bed without completely losing it again.

When Mel comes by a short while later, they are both still sweaty and tousled enough that she takes one look at them and sighs. “Well,” she mutters. “I guess you’re getting better.”


End file.
